Metacog Moment With Mom

Reading and rereading a recently published article in the online Harvard Business Review's Generative AI category titled Why AI Boosts Creativity for some Employees but Not Others by Jackson G. Lu, Shuana Sun, Zhuyl Angelina, Maw-Der Foo and Jing Zhou, I finally groked from the article that it boiled down to something called Metacognition. It set me to wondering if I was exercising any powers of metacognition leveraging AI the way I find myself doing more and more these days. I wondered if I have ever been metacognitive at all.

Firing up Gemini, I began querying about metacognition to delve into the nature and symptoms of it. The discussion progressed along until I asked Gemini this pointed question:

When I have an apparently random, passing thought, I enjoy trying to trace back in my thought stream to identify why it occurred. Is this an indication of Metacognition?

Gemini responded almost immediately (within a couple of seconds at most) affirmatively:

That is a perfect example of metacognition.

Put simply, Gemini stated, metacognition is thinking about thinking. I do a lot of that. A lot.

But that seemed too simplistic for such a cool sounding word as metacognition. Delving deeper launched a rich discussion which eventually led me to ask another pointed question:

A glance at something can trigger it [my thought stream back tracing], and so can particular segments of my thought stream. I try to trace back to cause because it has both intrigued and disturbed me how such tangential thinking patterns emerge.

Gemini responded by saying how I am essentially pulling back the curtain on my subconscious mind, revealing just how much background processing occurs without my permission. That rattled me a bit. I never considered anything arising in my thought stream as being there without my permission, but it was an apt description of my random, tangential thought sparks because I find my self-conversational being yammering on inside my head asking "Now where did that thought come from?" as though it happened almost intrusively.

Needless to say, this discussion sucked me down the rabbit hole and my tangential thoughts began intruding at an increasingly intense rate as I related feeling a sense of relief each time I successfully traced back to the origin-spark of a thought, sometimes experiencing frisson. Then usage of that word, "frisson" sparked memory of listening to my first live symphony orchestra performance at Jones Hall in Houston, Texas. It was the first time I had felt such a rush of almost electrical energy flow up and down my spine from the moment the orchestra struck its first note to the end of their magnificant musical performance. Spookily Gemini asked if I am "also particularly sensitive to patterns in the outside world, like in music, mathematics, or visual art?". I related that music especially triggers frisson, to a degree sometimes of swooning at sensations the music causes, and described my experience at Jones Hall. It described my first orchestral performance reaction as response to a high-fidelity cognitive load wherein my brain is simultaneously processing intervals and harmony, timbral layers, and physical vibrations caused by sound waves from the orchestra hitting me.

Apparently, with my metacognitive wiring, these music-triggered incidents of frisson are like total immersion in a giant living version of my own thought streams, overwhelming my mind. I have to agree with that assessment, because when it happenes, nothing else in the universe matters one whit. Music can seize control of my thought stream entirely, and journeys ensue. This happened years ago as my mother and I were talking one chilly autumn evening and heard strange sounds coming from the fireplace. It was oddly musical, yet organic and wild.

The weird sound went on for quite a while, compelling me to record it. It was being made by a mud dauber busily, rhythmically, melodiously building a new nest in which to lay its eggs. My mother and I had been engaged in a conversation about my father's recent death which had happened peacefully at home but not without having heavy impact on us both. Being so easily distracted and intrigued by the mud dauber's sonics from that serious conversation apparently indicate my mind's preference to operate in its Default Mode Network (the DMN), where daydreaming and random thoughts happen. From the moment I was thrust into that horrible institutionalized education organization called The Public School System, I have been plagued by my DMN as it yanked my attention away from non-creative thoughtstreaming activities to direct my attention on actions rife with creativity, much to the chagrin of teachers trained and paid to whip me into being a good little conformist. My DMN despised the schools, most of my teachers and certainly all of the government-mandated curricula they tried to force feed me for subsequent regurgitation during testing.

Public schools, its teachers–as directed by jinky school boards and administrators–were intent upon making the ECN (Executive Control Network) portion of my mind the default operating system of my existence. Instinctively (and fortunately) I rejected such small-mindedness and allowed my DMN to reign supreme because having it dictate when and how it would sync up with my ECN was the only way I could experience frisson with any degree of frequency. My ECN was never going to allow such nonsense as frisson on its own.

So the serious conversation with my mother was easily sidetracked by the delightful musicality of a mud dauber building its nest in the reverberant steel casing of the fireplace. That metacog moment with Mom persisted for me long after the mud dauber stopped working. I kept listening to the recoding of it and soon a musically-complimentary theme began to take shape in my DMN. A theme which would not mask or override the sheer beauty of the mud dauber's solo performance, but could instead complement it significantly.

Henceforth, the tune Fluehornet Serenade was created from thought stream cycles happening deep within my DMN while my ECN managed the technicalities of getting the composition recorded, mixed, mastered and published on the music page of this web site.

Fluehornet Serenade

The tune speaks for itself and I love to listen to it in both original solo form (not published on this web site) and musically-complemented form, but its backstory is what is most important to me. The back story from the moment the Houston Symphony struck its first note in Jones Hall which bowled me over with my first and most intense frisson, to the moment Mom and I enjoyed the mud dauber unwittingly serenading us on that chilly autumn evening long ago.

NOTE: I titled it the way I did because Muddauber Sereneade just didn't sound as elegant.